The aim of this essay is to argue that English intonation has broadly two functions. On the one hand it picks out a particular item or items in every sentence in order to give it or them semantic prominence; on the other hand, the pitch CONTOUR of an utterance also contributes to meaning and this contribution may itself be divided into two types: firstly, the height of pitch and the degree of its variation in a given utterance reflect speakers' ‘involvement’ or ‘interest’, and, secondly, the direction of the pitch contour towards or away from a neutral low pitch indicates the degree of ‘completeness’ or ‘incompleteness’ of an utterance in a discourse. I shall argue that the division of intonation into these two main subparts, an ‘accent’ function corresponding to what Halliday calls ‘tonicity’ and an ‘attitude’ function corresponding to Halliday's ‘tone’, is valid since it correlates with the division of meaning analysis into semantics and pragmatics.

Laurie Bauer seems to have let his imagination run away with him (Bauer, 1979). On the one hand, he has been misled by the similarity of phenomena in a number of accents of English into thinking that there is a common vowel shift in progress. On the other hand, he has been too selective and somewhat undiscriminating in his choice of corroborating evidence.

There are fourteen pure oral vowels in one of the several colloquial dialects of Tamil. On the basis of the author's proprioception and on the basis of a detailed spectrographic study, these were classified as front /i:, i, e:, ε/, back /ɑ:, ɑ, o:, o, u:, u/ and central /ə:, ə, ɨ:, ɨ/. X-rays were taken of the tongue-positions of ten of these vowels. These ten vowels are /i:, i, e:, ɑ:, ɑ, o:, o, u:, u, ə:, ɨ:/.

A universal concerning the origin of syllabic consonants is proposed by Bell, 1978: 165. This says that ‘the syllabicity of syllabic consonants never arises spontaneously from a marginal consonant, as far as I can ascertain. The source of syllabicity is always a vowel’. Certain apparently contradictory data in English ([elm] < elm) are adduced, but following Dobson, 1968, Bell (167) assumes an intermediate stage with shwa (eləm). There is evidence in Dobson that spellings with a vowel letter are indeed earlier than (for instance) Bullokar's capitalized consonant letters representing syllabic consonants. It seems to me, though, that we need to make a reservation about the assumption of the priority of svarabhakti over syllabization.